universe, vast universe

"being held prisoner by your skin while reaching infinity; being a captive of your scrap of time while touching eternity"

[marthajefferson]

“One wants to tell a story, like Scheherezade, in order not to die. It’s one of the oldest urges in mankind. It’s a way of stalling death.”

— Carlos Fuentes (via lovedly)

[only-alter-idem]

never letting anyone forget about this line ever

[clarkegriffins]

for vicky ♡

[gouged-doll]

would you ever want to share a book/essay etc list about dolls? saw you reference a few writings in your response to other asks would be cool if you shared the stuff you’ve read. I have a very similar fascination

here is a few off the top of my head: edison’s eve (highly recommend, no pdf)

on the marionette theatre - pdf

almost human - dolls and robots in contemporary art - pdf

a study of dolls - pdf

on longing - narratives of the miniature (dollhouses) - pdf

the youngest doll - pdf

puppets, masks, and performing objects - pdf

exploring the uncanny valley - pdf

the uncanny - pdf

sex dolls at sea (history of sex dolls) - pdf

the sex doll by ferguson

uncanny dolls: images of death in rilke and freud

the uncanny afterlife of dolls: reconfiguring personhood through object vivification in gothic film

anthropology: playing with dolls

adjacent topics:

a cyborg manifesto - pdf

technologies of the gendered body, reading cyborg women - pdf

how we became posthuman - pdf

the social life of things - pdf

vibrant matter - pdf

the arcades project by benjamin walter - pdf

postmodernism, the culture of late capitalism - pdf

i may be missing some but i can add to this. i may put together a list of media/technology/surveillance as well as i have quite a few collected. also i highly recommend the book “what do pictures want?” by w.j. t. mitchell. not related to dolls but it talks on the agency of the image which relates so much to dolls imo.

[the-night-picture-collector]

/ Lech Wilczek, The Polish Zoologist Simona Kossak (1943 - 2007) talks to Animals

[mossyshadows]

recent reads #5

what to say... the usual.. more short stories i've read recently & thoughts rather than recommendations and such #blogging

joanna's bodies - eugenia triantafyllou. the woman whose body joanna is renting has a nosebleed. jennifer's body inspired; childhood female friendship to co-dependent recurrent resurrection of your dead best friend pipeline wahoo ! my favourite on this list.

underneath the underneath - audrey zhou. hunting dragons + reproductive freedom.. the ideas in this story were sooo haunting

six sides of a fairy tale - audrey zhou. the prophet retells the future... it was more on the short and sweet side, it didn't really dig into the concepts as i would have liked? though preferred it to the previous story i think

hymn to scylla - elena goh. future floating singapore, dreaming of a monster.. the pacing of it all got a little too bogged down in the dream sequence prose imo

seven years from home - naomi novik. galactic confederacy & biological warfare in space, and a t.e. lawrence esque main character. i think novik should foray into scifi more.. her writing style suits it (is this backhanded? disclaimer guys i like scifi...) and a nice change from her usual fantasy themes

[nemfrog]

"Venus appears largest when in the crescent phase." Natural History. December 1949.

Internet Archive

[normalbrothers]

christa wolf, cassandra (tr. jan van heurck)

[neshamama]

david inshaw, "the raven," 1971

[only-alter-idem]

anyone else miss gansey-on-fire

like blue dropped ONE (1) hint that she kind of sort of cared about him and gansey’s ego went apeshit for the rest of the day

[ahududulugazoz]

[soracities]

Eavan Boland, “A Woman Painted on a Leaf”

[Text ID: “I want a poem I can grow old in. I want a poem I can die in.”]

[petaltexturedskies]

The summer night glowed; in the field, fireflies were glinting. And for those who understood such things, the stars were sending messages: You will leave the village where you were born and in another country you’ll become very rich, very powerful, but always you will mourn something you left behind, even though you can’t say what it was, and eventually you will return to seek it.

Louise Glück, from "Midsummer" in Poems 1962-2012

[petaltexturedskies]

John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

[joanna-lannister]

MARIE ANTOINETTE (2006) dir. Sofia Coppola

[lindwurmbride]

that moment at the beginning of bllb when they're in cabeswater and blue starts thinking of her namesake flower and then petals start falling, one landing on gansey's lips. just insane, peak romance, they're straight out of a fairy tale

[aestheticjunkyard]

Tess McMillan by Szilveszter Makó for Zalando February 2025